Ignore those who mess with your pace.
Be deliberate and accommodating with your assumptions about other people and you’ll find, as Marcus says, calmer seas and fairer weather.
You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.
You cannot get better if you’re convinced you are the best.
We must, as Shakespeare said, “meet the time as it seeks us.” Our destiny is here. Let’s seize it.
Man is pushed by drives,” Viktor Frankl observed. “But he is pulled by values.” Ruled by or ruling? Which are you? Without the right values, success is brief. If we wish to do more than flash, if we wish to last, then it is time to understand how to battle this new form of ego and what values and principles are required in order to beat it.
Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding.
Or think of Darwin, working for decades on his theory of evolution, refraining from publishing it because it wasn’t yet perfect. Hardly anyone knew what he was working on. No one said, Hey Charles, it’s okay that you’re taking so long, because what you’re working on is just so important. They didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. He just knew that it wasn’t done yet, that it could be better, and that that was enough to keep him going.
You’ll never complete all your tasks if you allow yourself to be distracted with every tiny interruption. Your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don’t squander it!
And though we’d like to think that planning and resources – or righteousness and worthiness – determines who wins and who loses, they don’t. So often these things come down to a simple factor: Who wants it more?
Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced misfortune. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.
When “you combine insecurity and ambition,” the plagiarist and disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer said when reflecting back on his fall, “you get an inability to say no to things.
The night is dark and full of terrors. We face many enemies in life. But you have to understand: They are not nearly as formidable as your mind makes you think.
As Epictetus says, the goal when we experience adversity is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.
It’s when the notion of ourselves and the world grows so inflated that it begins to distort the reality that surrounds us. When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that “sucks us down like the law of gravity.
George Clooney spent his first years in Hollywood getting rejected at auditions.
We subconsciously submit to what Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, refers to as the “tyranny of being picked.
Never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small,” Florence Nightingale said, “for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.
How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response.
No rule is perfect, but this one works: Our fears point us, like a self-indicting arrow, in the direction of the right thing to do.